Of Efforts and Betrayals

There comes the time in the life of a man where he stands before that bathroom mirror and looks at himself.

He examines the face in front of him. He studies what he sees, peers into the reflection, into the image that peers back out at him.

Then he reaches for the shaving cream, grabs the razor, and it begins.

Every guy has his own ritual to shaving. Even if it’s something you had done every morning of every day for the last twenty years of your life, it has some meaning to you. You have your ceremony, the special way you do it or whatever.

 The art of shaving has special significance to man. And to a man who would rather keep his beard than to have it under the knife (blade, whatever), shaving for the first time in years can be a sad, humbling experience.

It was for me.

For you see, on that fateful morning of the eventful day preceding the unpredictable interview, I had to shave.

I like my beard. Sure, it’s nothing as powerful, or glamorous, or even as tale-worthy as The Goatee of Neal. But it’s my beard, I wear it, and it wears me. My beard... is a part of me.

It… it was a part of me.

(Deep breath)

I’m alright, I’m fine.

Okay, I’ll be honest with you. My beard wasn’t much, but with it, I looked my age. Well, barely. Without it, I looked like a kid, and, with my height, looking three years younger is the last thing I need at any given day.

Stop smiling, darn you, I’m pouring my guts out here.

But this time, I didn’t have a choice. Everyone I asked said I had to do it. I had to shave. No buts about it. And believe me, I argued.

I lost. And so, there I was, Monday morning, feeling a traitor the whole while as I took that up that razor and looked at my old friend for the last time.

And then I shaved it off. I made it quick, precise. I didn’t linger over it. I didn’t want to linger over it. I put the razor down, splashed water, toweled off, and looked up again.

It was done. People, I was looking at my chin after three years. I was able to see my chin again after three years. There’s no way of putting those feelings lightly, so I’m just going to skip past that.

The day was weird, to say the least. I walked out into the world, shivering and hardly knowing why. In the bus, I was feeling a strange sensation under my chin, and it took me a minute to realize it was the wind on my bare skin.

It had been three years since my chin felt the breeze. My chin, I understood then, did not like the breeze.

Time was running out for me since I had a late start, and when the bus was halfway to the City, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. There was no possible way for me to get to my boarding room, change, and then go all the way back to the office building in time. I had to be there by 4pm, and it was already half past 2.

 That’s when my buddy FH saved me, the guy who was supposed to pick me up at the room and give me moral support. Instead of heading out to my room, he had me drop by at his place, far closer to both where I had to get off the bus and the office building.

There, I showered, changed, and did that thing all of us do when we’re in new clothes; I asked him:

“How do I look?”

He looked me over.

“Well… um. Apparently, the first thing you’ve got to do, Matt, is to convince them,”

I turned around, barely destroying the careful knot in my tie, “Obviously. Convincing them is what I have to do,”

“No, Matt. Not that. I meant… convince them you’re 21, and not… you get the point.”

I got the point. Awfully evident, that point was. Sometimes, bland honesty can help immensely. And at other times, bland honesty deserved a kick up the rear and good flush down the toilet for all the help it did.

Just the sort of encouragement a guy needs before his interview.

In the recap post that I did about how it went, I left out a crucial fact that was so humongous, it needed a whole different post to deal with it the way it deserved. This happens to be that very post, and it's time to tell you what really went down there.

Let me take you back to that office, back to the 13^th floor, just as the elevator went DING.

I squared my shoulders, screwed my face into as macho an expression as my beard-less cheeks would let me, then stepped out.

  

“Matt?”

My jaw dropped.

Sitting there and staring at me in shock, was, as you remember, HD.

Unshaved, in all his scruffy bearded majesty, HD.

That’s right. After all my despair, heartbreak, loss of face, and cold chinned-ness, HD was sitting right there in suit and beard, oblivious to the agony I felt at the sight of his whiskers.

My outrage and despair was also what helped give rise to the awkward moment that followed, a moment that would have stretched on till eternity had the elevator not DINGed, and AM come in.

AM, who had also not, believe it or not, decided not to shave. He saw us, started talking and broke the proverbial wall, and that was when our third friend, ZL, showed up.

You should be seeing the pattern by now. Obviously, ZL was (surprise) unshaven as well, and perfectly at ease. There they were, the three of them, perfectly happy. 

And there I was, in the middle. Perfectly not.

You would not believe how traumatizing that experience was.

And that’s the true, untold story, of what happened at my first interview. And you thought the drama of that epiphany I had was bad enough. I had that epiphany in the midst of renewed mourning of my beard, and that says something.

What does it say, you ask? No idea, just go with whatever interpretation takes your fancy.

So, well, here I am, and my beard is growing back, slowly and steadily. Having to shave the thing off was bad enough. Going beardless into the big bad world and finding out that I really didn’t have to in the first place… ‘harsh’ doesn’t quite cover it.

Especially when the guy who told me to shave in the first place goes, “Oops,” when I tell him what happened.

If there was a sliver lining to this whole fiasco, it had to be the one thing I learned… never take your beard for granted again.

Sigh. Counting the days, people, counting the days.